The order of mankind as seen by Auguste Comte

centre of government at Newcastle for the Province of the NorthEast, and of a vision of Wessex reborn in glory with King Alfred’s golden dragon standard flaming from its flag-pole when the Governor and Executive Council meet in their Palace at Winchester.

To follow Comte’s thinking towards its application to society we must establish the step from his Law of the Three Stages, referred to already. He saw the first or Theological stage as being marked by conquest, the second or Metaphysical stage as being concerned with defence, and the third or Positive stage as being the age of Industry. (His debt to Saint-Simon must be noticed in this connection.) In order to apply science to society, an ordering of the sciences is needed, and this necessary step towards a philosophy of the sciences is carried out by a fine example of Comte’s thinking. He wrote, in the first chapter of his “Positive Philosophy’:

‘Now that the human mind has founded celestial physics, terrestrial physics (mechanical and chemical), and organic physics (vegetable and animal), it only remains to complete the system of observational sciences by the foundation of Social Physics. This is at the present time, under several important aspects, the greatest and most pressing of our mental needs’.

He adds:

‘The formation of Social Physics at last completes the system of natural sciences. It therefore becomes possible and even necessary to summarise these different sciences, so that they may be co-ordinated by presenting them as so many branches of a single trunk, instead of continuing to look upon them as only so many isolated groups’.

And again further on:

‘All that is necessary is to create one more great speciality

consisting in the study of scientific generalisations’. And he adds:

“At the same time, the other scientists, before devoting themselves to their respective specialities, should have received a previous training embracing all the general principles of positive knowledge’.

Later on he makes a further observation even more obviously